Here are my ideas to reduce anxiety around the college admissions process to help students make better decisions that will enable them to thrive and grow during their undergraduate years and beyond.

Anticipation: How to Manage Waiting for College Decisions

When the college process gets to you as a parent, keep reminding yourself that all you really want is for your child to be happy.

I asked my Class of 2023 students, “What advice would you give your younger self about the college process?” Their answers, in my opinion, should be required reading for any family embarking on the journey to college. Here are the voices of my wonderful senior class of whom I am very proud.

As this year’s admissions cycle comes to a close, I’m reflecting on the insights into college admissions from this cycle that will inform my approach to working with rising seniors, juniors, and sophomores.

Tools are there to help us not get bogged down by our weaknesses. But anyone can learn to write. Anyone. Full stop. It is a discipline. It is also a skill that should not be lost to technological advances. Why? Writing requires other skills that are valuable: critical thinking, analysis, wrestling with hard ideas, and slowing down in a frenetic world.

I love my job. I am lucky that I get to do the work I do with, and on behalf of, the extraordinary students who trust me with their college journey. Here is something I wrote just for them.

Parents view college acceptance as a can’t fail event, and we seek to control as much of the process as we can, so that our children’s happiness is ensured. Except that in truth, the less parents micromanage the process, the more successful our children’s long-term outcomes will be.

If you are the parent of a high school student, you also wonder how your child can make the best use of their summer with an eye towards college. One of the more common questions I receive from my client families is “What do colleges want students to do with their summer? What looks good?”.

Families do not know how to assess the quality of a college, and lacking the road map to do so, they are left relying on rankings and admit rates. Here are the 5 spheres we recommend looking into in order to properly assess the quality of a college or university (and nail down your application list):

We focused on what we always do, continuing to know our students well, developing balanced lists and helping them create compelling applications for themselves. We couldn’t control closed campuses, missing grades or cancelled testing, so we worked with and on behalf of our students to understand and mitigate those impacts as best as we could.